[Wittrs] Constituting Subjectivity
- From: Joseph Polanik <jpolanik@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 06:14:42 -0400
SWM wrote:
>Joseph Polanik wrote:
>>>okay; but, isn't that just what you have called irreducibility?
>>>No. I've referred to "irreducibility" as the supposition that,
>>>whatever consciousness is (e.g., features like understanding,
>>>imagining, being aware, etc., -- or an aggregate of them), it cannot
>>>be explained as being the outcome of events or activities or
>>>operations more basic than itself (i.e., not already having the
>>>nature of those features). The molecules of water aren't wet at the
>>>atomic level because there is no wetness as far as we know at that
>>>level. But at our level of observation one of the features of the
>>>aggregation of the said molecules, under certain conditions, is the
>>>phenomenon or feature we know as "wetness".
>>>This, by the way, comes straight from Searle, himself, though he uses
>>>it in a different context, making a different point. When it comes to
>>>the CRA, however, he seems to forget about this as a possible
>>>explanation for the occurrence of consciousness in the universe and
>>>seems, instead, to entirely miss the point that a system level
>>>explanation of consciousness, which sees consciousness as a complex
>>>of features operating at a certain level, is not excluded from the
>>>realm of possibility and may, indeed, offer the best explanation of
>>>what consciousness is.
>>how is this different from Searle's position?
>[Searle] does not reject the system account vis a vis brains ... Now
>this puts him in contradiction since, if brains do it in a system way,
>then why shouldn't other physical platforms (say computers) do so?
there is no contradiction. Searle is not saying that brains 'do it'
because units performing syntactical operations are combined in a
'system way'.
Joe
--
Nothing Unreal is Self-Aware
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